The views expressed in this blog are based entirely on personal tastes and opinions. They should not be construed as professional reviews in anyway. Any resemblance to actual reviews, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Ichiban Boshi revisited

C says:

With so many new Japanese restaurants springing up just waiting for us to try, until tonight we hadn’t been back to our previous old faithful Ichiban Boshi in more than a year. Frankly, I think their standard has been gradually deteriorating; either that, or the standard of rival as well as new sushi chains has steadily improved. I’ve been growing less and less enamoured with their thin slivers of fish paired with huge portions of densely-packed rice.

A however, chastised me for becoming too atas, and casting aside the humble eateries from our dating days. Fine... so to humour him we went back to the Great World City branch for dinner tonight, since we had to pick up some sushi for a friend’s housewarming.

While the standard sushi (salmon, maguro, unagi) was pretty decent – they seem to be using smaller chunks of rice now, the aburi sushi platter of their new ‘gourmet sushi’ menu reinforced my current views. At $25 for 8 pieces, this didn’t come cheap but while they certainly tried, this was just executed so poorly.

The uni was a bit fishy, but my main complaint was that they smothered almost every piece of sushi with so much sauce that you could barely taste the fish, let alone the fact that it had been aburi-ed. The tai sushi was drenched in a very salty miso sauce, and worse still, the yellowtail was doused with sweet chilli sauce. Sacrilege! Who puts sweet chilli sauce on sushi, especially in those amounts?! At least they didn’t commit the ultimate sin of saucing the otoro, but this still wasn’t as melt-in-the-mouth fatty as the aburi otoro at Sushi Tei.

I think they simply tried too hard with that dish, when they could have just kept it simple and done what they do pretty well – simple, no-frills sushi; average quality at decent prices.

A says:

The gourmet menu items are to be avoided. Just go for the affordable $2.10 sushi dishes and you’ll have a decent meal.